4
“The geh goes meong-meong, meong-meong!” Nat barked.
Karen clapped her hands and reached out to tickle her under her tough skinny little arms. Children really squealed when you tickled them—that was a fact. Would Nat remember these pleasures when she was older? Karen did not remember her own. It was all a mess of stolen television hours, cassette tapes clasped into Walkmen, computer programming classes her father made her take at the local Y （who but him knew they would pay off so handsomely?）， and the private “Mongoose” language she had invented with Evelyn, snorts and grunts and clicks of the tongue their parents could not understand, its logics as intuitive to her as BASIC or C++. But had anyone ever tickled her? She crossed her arms and tried to tickle herself under the armpits. Maybe it only worked when someone else did it to you.
The child woke up earlier than her parents, so they got in a Korean lesson before Masha hauled her off to the joyless pursuit of Russian and third-grade math and the steady flow of practical therapies. （“Mommy, how long is today’s session with Dr. Sandra?”） For an entire hour Nat and Karen lived in a world where piggies did a properly piggy ggul-ggul-ggul, because on what planet could a fat pink-eared dwaegi possibly produce a mannered sound like oink? They focused on animals at first, since they were surrounded by them. A geh was both a dog and a crab. A neoguri was a raccoon dog, a curious citizen of East Asia, more akin to a fox. Steve, on the other hand, was clearly a mamo. （Every language should have almost as many vowels as consonants, ten to sixteen in the Hangul alphabet.）
She was in no way qualified to teach Korean, Karen knew, having herself been brought up in that embarrassing immigrant mix of being spoken to by her parents in the true language and replying in the shameful adopted one. Only Vinod and Senderovsky had held on to their respective tongues with flair, although Karen always thought it had made it harder for them to blend in, to accept that they were fully here and not there （witness Vinod’s persistent accent and Senderovsky’s bungalow madness）。
But Karen loved hearing the sound of her own half-English, half-Korean garble, and it was hard to keep Nat from repeating it at the dinner table, where they could both see Masha’s hurt and surprise. “Many great writers spoke Russian,” Karen once told her over Ed’s scorching cod livornese, “like your dad.” But there was no Russian analogue to BTS, no J-Hope with his weird “acorn” pouch and perfect aegyo （performative cuteness）， and certainly no sweet lovable Jin with his corny jokes and thick sculpted lips. It fascinated Karen how her original homeland was now open to the world, while Senderovsky’s did nothing but try to undermine the few good things about it. No wonder the child wanted one and not the other.
The walls of her bungalow were now transformed. She was on the phone daily with her assistant, shepherding an endless parade of trucks up the gravel driveway, Masha watching the parcels being unloaded at the driveway’s terminus and carried off to Karen’s bungalow. In Masha’s mind the words “I’m losing her” fought hand to hand, syllable to syllable, with “But she’s so happy.” During bath time Masha had tried cooing Russian songs about accordion-playing crocodiles as she tried to tickle her daughter, to make her squeal, but the child moved without affect between her hands, the warmth of the day and its attendant joys still on her skin. At least her screen time was down, replaced by imaginative play. Her speech was less rigid, more pragmatic. Isn’t this exactly what they wanted out of the Kindness Academy? A friend? Karen was close to fifty but, in Masha’s estimation, stunted in all the right places.
Karen’s living room was covered with Hangul on the walls and little homemade flash cards of all the consonants and vowels. Nat would put together combinations of each, the diphthongs undulating throughout the simple room, while the other room was covered with BTS posters from the Love Yourself tour and a scratchy supposedly microfiber BTS bedding set which Karen would change as soon as she came home from watching the Japanese reality show in Ed’s bungalow or dancing with Vinod on the covered porch. In Nat’s imagination, the members of BTS all secretly lived in Karen’s bungalow when they weren’t touring, and they had become her friends. She and Karen watched videos about which food they liked to eat, J-Hope predictably choosing good old haembeogeo （diphthongs, assemble!） and kimchi fried rice, while Jin skewed more delicate with his love of lobster and cold summer buckwheat noodles with brisket and apple cider vinegar. “Come on, Ed,” Karen said, “make naengmyeon for Nat. She’s dying to try it. Take a break from the Mediterranean shit. All that chee-juh is giving me gas. Don’t be so self-hating.”